Blood

Well, here's my first Andy Milligan film, and I'm feeling fairly indifferent about it, even though I fully knew what to expect. A strange family move into a new home. The husband is some sort of doctor working on various serums from carnivorous plants. His wife has an aversion to sunlight and needs constant injections. One of their servants is used as a blood bank to feed the plants and is all messed up due to this, and of the other two servants, one has no legs and the other is well on the way to having no legs due to some horrible disease.

The doctor meets his solicitor who's up to something dodgy with his dead father's estate, and also he falls in love with the solicitor's secretary. All this leads to, mainly, is people standing around in period costumes, talking endlessly. This film was under an hour long and I still had to watch it over two nights just to keep my attention.

There's werewolves, vampires, man-eating plants, people getting axed through the head, but everything to me seemed a bit flat and boring. Also, it looked like someone killed a mouse for real at one point – that's no good, is it? I'm not writing Milligan off yet – I've got Guru the Mad Monk to watch too – I'll give that a chance soon.

Blood is another one of Andy Milligan's coma-inducing home-made horrors that tests the patience with its leaden pacing, awful direction, overly verbose script and wooden acting.

Stephen Thrower, author of Nightmare USA, praises Milligan for being a true auteur, with a style that distinguishes his work from other directors. This I cannot deny - Milligan's method of film-making is certainly unique - but everything that Thrower enjoys about his films, I find insufferable. Made on an extremely low budget, Milligan's movies are on a par with amateur dramatics productions, and as much as I appreciate trashy films, they're just too badly made and incredibly dull for me to enjoy.

Milligan certainly gives it his best shot, with a schlocky plot that sees the wolfman's son, Lawrence (Allan Berendt), and his vampire wife Regina (Hope Stansbury), the daughter of Dracula, cultivating carnivorous plants in order to try and cure Regina's malady. Along the way, we also get a bit of incest and some cheesy gore, all of which should add up to a good time, but Milligan's lifeless direction and the dialogue heavy script prevent this from being the entertaining cheeze-fest that it could have been (in the hands of a better film-maker).

2.5/10, rounded down to 2 for the mouse/meat cleaver scene, which I suspect wasn't a special effect.

Blood (1974)

** (out of 4)

Downright craziness from director Andy Milligan has Lawrence Talbot working under the last name Orlovsky. He moves his wife, the daughter of Dracula, into a house where he also brings along a wide range of weird people. Inside the house he is growing plants, which will eat humans but there are more dark secrets within these walls.

Milligan has a huge cult following and it's really easy to see why. I've gone through a hand full of the director's films and for the most part I've found them ranking from downright horrid to suicide worthy. With that said, BLOOD is probably the best film I've seen from him because of how crazy and bizarre it is. I'm not sure if the director just figured he'd throw everything into a film and see what would stick but you've got a werewolf, Dracula's daughter, a deformed mutant and of course the man-eating plants.

There are some really kooky moments throughout this thing ranging to some bizarre dialogue where the wife wants to know if her husband still loves her to a werewolf attack that is filmed in such dark conditions that you can't even see what is happening. The melodrama that Mulligan adds to a lot of his horror pictures is something that actually works here because of the fact that it's a werewolf and a vampire. The added supporting of the other freaks is just a good bonus.

The performances really aren't all that bad and the film has a much more professional look that the majority of the director's work. At just under 70 minutes the movie manages to keep your interest throughout.

BLOOD is yet another epic from Director Andy Milligan. It is the tale of Dr. Lawrence Orlovsky and his wife, Regina (Hope Stansbury). Lawrence is a stern, rude man, perhaps due to his hat being six sizes too small.

Enter Regina, a vampire brought in during daylight. This explains why she resembles a molten pizza with fangs. Regina needs injections to keep her from disintegrating altogether. Thus injected, she whines incessantly. This helps to offset Lawrence's turd-on-a-rope personality.

Meanwhile, their servants, including the leg-deprived Orlando (Michael Fischetti), the brain-destroyed Carlotta (Pichulina Hempi), and the soon-to-be-one-legged Carrie (Patti Gaul), take care of the Orlovsky's man-eating plant collection (aka: plastic hotel lobby foliage). Horror ensues.

While this movie is full of Milligan's signature cardboard characters spouting absurd dialogue, there is a bit of a story here somewhere. In spite of the Director's trademark meandering, there's even a modicum of tension. In fact, this could be the best Andy Milligan movie ever made!

Of course, it's still a sub-sludge production, featuring horrid camera work, lantern-like lighting, etc., but at least the damned thing makes some sort of sense! With BLOOD, Milligan reached the pinnacle of his... "talent".

THE BEST SCENE IN THIS MOVIE: When Petra (Eve Crosby), who looks as though she sleeps in a coal bin, is attacked by Halloween-novelty-teeth-wearing Regina! After witnessing this, one will never look at mannequin arms in the same way again! Ever!...

Blood - 1972 ( This Films Rates a D+ ) The year is 1883. Strange characters travel from Europe to America and are engaged in human experimentation. A werewolf doctor is married to a vampire who have assistants growing flesh eating plants. These plants are growing stronger and can devour a whole human body. Eventually everything is in chaos. Poor scripting with even worse acting. It is as if I am watching a high school play. Some of the camera angles and sequences are out of focus with poor sound transitions between scenes. At 57:44 and for about 1+ minute, the whole sequence is nothing but a black screen. The film is intentionally funny, from the make up to the costumes to lines like this "Not so fast my pretty, I aint finished yet", But often times its not intentional. Minimal gore though not absent of it. There is not enough action going on for me to love this film (and I love cheese). It has fun moments but overall it falters in to many places.